Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘we should have tried a lot harder to do this ages ago.’

  ‘Hear hear,’ said Ira.

  Mark glanced around and knew he had their attention now. For the first time since they’d left port, he saw hope. He pressed on, buoyed by his success.

  ‘Think of what we could achieve,’ he told them. ‘If we could end this stupid war, people would be able to start living in peace. Our society could start untwisting itself. Humanity would have the chance to flourish. To re-establish trade. To climb out of our social straitjacket. We could all go back to living like normal people.’

  Palla snorted. ‘What, with wars and crime and all that?’

  Mark shook his head. ‘I’m not talking about crime,’ he said with a strained laugh. ‘I’d just rather not live in a police state that enforces order via death squads and hopscotch.’

  ‘I like hopscotch,’ said Palla. Her expression was unreadable now, but the chromatophores on her skull had started pulsing. ‘I’m all for peace and disbanding the death squads, but frankly, Mark, the society you grew up in was kind of shit. I’d rather go forwards, not backwards. I mean, didn’t all this happen in the first place because you guys couldn’t get over your tribal impulses and Neolithic religions?’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Mark. He felt urgency to rekindle the positivity. ‘We had problems, but it wasn’t like that. And I can see why you want to believe the New Society is an improvement, because that’s what you’ve got.’

  Palla guffawed at him. ‘Gosh, Captain Mark, thank you for eldersplaining so eloquently. So I’m brainwashed then? Indoctrinated?’

  ‘No, I just don’t think you got to have much of a childhood, that’s all.’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Did you?’ she said.

  She’d read his file, of course. She knew all about the disastrous roboteering programme he’d been born into – the Monets’ abortive attempt to equip the human race with super-talented pilots using Will’s DNA. These days, they taught it in school history classes.

  ‘Admittedly, no. But I still want to fight for that for others. I mean, do you really enjoy all that enforced play?’

  ‘Actually, Mark, it’s not forced,’ said Palla, smiling like a shark. ‘Weird though it may look to you, play can be a duty and a pleasure at the same time.’

  Mark glanced around the table and felt dismay. He missed Zoe acutely. She was the diplomat in their marriage. He’d never been good at inspiring people, no matter how much he might want to win hearts and minds.

  He picked his next words carefully. ‘I just see that you’ve been forced to carry a heavy burden,’ he said.

  ‘I volunteered!’ said Palla. She waved a teasing finger at him. ‘I’ll tell you what the New Society does, Mark. It teaches people to take responsibility first and orders second. Are you really sure that it was better the other way around? Do you really want us to go back to hierarchies?’ She gestured at Ira. ‘Maybe you want to put this glassy-eyed ruin back in charge – the man who burned worlds.’ She slid him a mocking glance. ‘By the way, how’s breakfast, Grandad? You remembered to wash your hands before eating, I hope. You don’t want to get all that blood on your virtual pastry.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Mark snapped.

  But Palla was staring at Ira, waving at him now. ‘Any reaction there, Admiral Baron? Or are you just going to stare at the sea like a fucking automaton? Hello! Come in, President Genocide!’

  Mark felt his hands closing into fists.

  ‘It’s okay, Palla,’ said Ira with a chuckle. ‘I’m all here and I’m still listening. Say what you like.’

  He sounded awfully calm. Mark, in contrast, couldn’t hack it a moment longer. He got up.

  ‘Palla, I’m sorry I insulted you,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I intended.’

  Palla looked amused. ‘I’m not insulted. Who’s insulted? I’m just looking out for Judj, here, who’s practically crying into his orange juice, aren’t you, Judj?’

  Judj blinked at her in surprise.

  ‘I think I’m going to take a walk on the deck,’ said Mark stiffly.

  ‘Can’t take the heat, fly boy?’ Palla called after him. ‘Bring those tight buns back here. We’ve only just started!’

  Mark kept walking until breakfast lay out of sight. He stood at the railing and glared down at the ridiculous twitching fish. A minute later, Ira quietly appeared and stood beside him.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’ he said with a wry smile.

  Mark eyed him, torn between empathy and disappointment.

  ‘Ever since the briefing shuttle, Palla’s been picking on you,’ he said. ‘She keeps dissing your record, which is unbelievable bullshit. I can’t think of anyone in recent history who’s had to carry as big a burden as you. But you just seem to … take it.’

  Her grandad line had pissed Mark off, too. Ira was a mountain of gleaming muscle who didn’t look a day over thirty. Besides his age, in what way was he a grandad?

  Ira resumed staring across the water. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘She’s just nervous. Even if we make it past the Zone, this is still a hard straw for someone her age to draw.’

  ‘She’s our SAO, Ira,’ Mark insisted. ‘She’s supposed to be the voice of the common good. I don’t think it’s acceptable for someone in that position to be calling you a ruin. That was unacceptable. Is that the common good – needling you for a lifetime of service? I worked under you for years and I never knew a better leader. You were practically family, for crissakes. I can’t take much more of her bullshit. I swear, if she talks to you like that again, I’m going to have words with her.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Ira wearily. ‘Really, it’s fine. It’s not important.’

  He looked unfazed to the point of indifference. Mark wasn’t sure whether to be impressed by that bottomless sangfroid or appalled. This was how Ira apparently responded to everything now.

  ‘If it’s okay with me, can you leave it alone?’ Ira said.

  When Mark didn’t reply, his old mentor sighed.

  ‘She’s just angry, Mark. The poor girl has probably spent years studying my decisions – poring over mistakes I made in split seconds. To today’s leader-kids I probably look like a walking textbook of disaster. So do you. So does Ann. Palla’s too young to have seen all the shit we had to live through. If you really want to fix it, here’s what you can do. Go back and talk to her. Give the girl some attention. Let her tell you all the things that are great about her brave new world. Fuck it, why not flirt a little? What’s the harm?’

  Mark scowled. Palla’s not-so-subtle sexual remarks about him were another concern. She knew he was mono and coupled, so why did she bother? Was she trying to seduce him or bully him?

  ‘Try to get her excited about your vision for the mission,’ Ira suggested. ‘Talk to her about what might be on the other side of the Zone. This is the first mission into the unknown for years. That’s pretty exciting. For all our military agenda, we’re going to put an end to decades of speculation, presuming we make it. Finding out whether the Zone is natural or not will be an achievement in itself.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ said Mark. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for awe if we live long enough. What I want to know is what she thinks she gains by baiting us and how we make it stop. You’re the ship’s psychologist, Ira. Don’t you want to help with this? I don’t know why you’re being so passive. It isn’t like you.’

  Ira slid a pair of lifeless blue eyes in Mark’s direction. ‘Here’s a different perspective,’ he said. ‘How do you imagine she feels? Why shouldn’t she be angry? She’s been told that it’s her job to hold us together. Three of the biggest figures in modern history. Why wouldn’t she try to cut us down to size? How would you have felt if someone had landed this shit in your lap at her age?’

  ‘They practically did,’ said Mark.

  ‘And were you happy about it?’

  ‘No. But frankly, I was a dick at that point,’ s
aid Mark. ‘I wasn’t handling anything well. I still did my goddamn job, though.’

  ‘Without pissing anyone off?’ said Ira. ‘You know that’s not true. So cut her some slack. She’d probably be just as angry at receiving any other kind of suicide mission. The fact that it’s us three isn’t even relevant.’

  ‘Why is this about suicide?’ Mark demanded. ‘It doesn’t have to be. That’s what I was trying to say. Has everyone forgotten what optimism looks like? We can live through this and make a difference! Seeing this as a death sentence is part of the attitude problem. If she’d just—’

  Mark’s words were interrupted by a piercing alarm. All at once, the yacht metaphor fell away, dumping them into a tactical immersive. His gut lurched as the gravity died. They’d been kicked out of warp.

  Mark flicked his view to a gravity-analytics filter. Against the rainbow backdrop of local space hung a long, black smear of viscid ions dotted with rapidly updating threat indicators – a disrupter cloud. It stretched across the local warp-shell like a razor-wire fence, vanishing to a point in either direction. It was huge, and they were stuck in it. For a cloud this big, there had to be thousands of Phote drones dumping ions to keep it stable.

  Mark’s heart sank. Suddenly, his urgency to fix everyone’s attitude evaporated. He saw it for what it was: something to think about instead of the inevitable fight against a foe that never stopped.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ said Ira, hovering next to him in the darkness. ‘Now we have something to do.’

  4.3: ANN

  Ann watched through the helm metaphor as the Photes quietly announced themselves. They’d filtered their signal cleverly, so that it appeared to come from all across the disrupter cloud like whispers in the night. She couldn’t see a single drone.

  ‘Did you know that ninety-one per cent of overhauled ships are successfully converted?’ it crooned. ‘The Photurian Utopia now retains individual identities, but happiness is still guaranteed. So why not avoid discomfort and join now? A fresh sense of purpose and joy is yours for the taking. You know you want it.’

  The attached video stream contained the usual bullshit advertising, full of breathless rapture and sunshine. Something in Ann woke up at the sight of that invitation to kill. There would be no more sitting around waiting to die. Given that this was probably her last chance to clean, she intended to make full use of it.

  She swapped to combat mode and assessed her ship with a full internal sensor sweep. Sure enough, the disrupter cloud the Photes had laid for them was scattered with driller drones. She could feel them all across her exohull like ticks, gnawing their way into the Dantes’ ceramic flesh. This ship was less hardy than her poor, wounded Ariel. Soft-assault warnings were already showing up at one or two of her data couplings, which meant she had to take their presence seriously.

  Until a few years back, the Photes always tried to cripple ships in order to capture the crews alive. That didn’t work so well any more. Not since the development of Phote-poison. Now crews gave themselves shots full of designer prions when capture loomed so that they could take out as many of the enemy as possible after conversion. For a brief, wonderful time, the raids had stopped.

  The Photes’ newest tactic was to try to incapacitate the crew fast using carefully engineered soft assaults launched in-hull via the victim ship’s own data pipes. They had data weapons that could target and incapacitate life support, wiping out cabin med function at a stroke and often forcing coma on the crew. The Photes could usually still make converts out of half-dead humans, it turned out.

  ‘I’m initiating a hull purge,’ Ann told the others. ‘Brace yourselves.’

  She gritted her teeth as she waited impatiently through the extra seconds it took for the rest of the crew to acknowledge her warning. Normal humans took for ever to react.

  As soon as they were ready, she shut down the engines. A second later, her casket hissed open and dropped her out of virt, into the cabin’s siren-filled, plastic-scented air. The others struggled out of their berths and away from the walls, into the cabin’s cramped centre, while red warning icons flashed at them from the wall-panels. The air scrubbers hissed wildly as they snapped into safe mode. The cabin temperature dropped like a rock.

  Everyone hung together in the air, turning slowly and watching each other as they shivered and prepared to die.

  ‘Is this it?’ said Clath. ‘They found us already? We didn’t even make it to the Zone.’

  Fleet officers were trained to take their fatal shots before letting the Photes get to them, and to execute anyone who appeared reluctant to do so. They all understood the gravity of the moment.

  ‘We’re not done yet,’ said Mark.

  Ann just hummed tunelessly to herself as she waited for the purge to complete. Judj eyed her as if begging her to shut up. She smirked at him. Then, after an eternity of milliseconds, the final report downloaded into her sensorium.

  [Cabin security refreshed. First-wave hull defence active. Commencing spatial scans.]

  Ann launched off from her crew-mates back to her berth, being careful not to smash their bones as she did so. She grabbed the edge of the coffin and hurled herself in, pressing her mind back into the ship’s systems before the door could shut.

  Thankfully, the Photes hadn’t made it far into the mesohull. The new scans came back almost clean. Only in two spots did her idiot robots need support. As the first officer back in the loop, it was Ann’s job to deal with that, and she was ideally suited to the task.

  She brought the closest team of titan mechs to full awareness and threw them up the curving track through the metallic caverns of the ship’s interior at two hundred kilometres per hour. Ahead of them, a maggot-like Phote machine had been disgorged from its driller-shell. After chewing through the exohull, it had deployed a defensive microdrone swarm and clamped its mouthparts around the nearest data artery. The air around the incursion site was thick with the burned remnants of her initial defence wave.

  As soon as they saw her lead robot coming, the microdrones threw themselves at it like angry hornets. Ann diced as many as she could with raster-beams and decoupled from the track to avoid the rest. She reached for the maggot’s head and carved through it, driving the monomolecular blades on her upper arms into its central processor bundle. Drones battered her back, detonating against her armour plating. With her other limbs, she seized the maggot’s mouthparts and ripped them away from the damaged cable, piece by ugly piece.

  The maggot’s body bucked and twisted. From the magnetic field bunching around it, she could tell it was squeezing its fusion bottle to overload. With her second robot, Ann reached straight through the maggot’s side and tore out its primary power conduit. The thing went dead in a flash of spent plasma. Ann lost her second mech but the remaining microdrones exploded in a rapid cascade. Job done.

  She set the rest of her mech team repairing the exohull breach and turned her full attention to the other incursion site. That was when she realised that Mark was already on it.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Ann growled.

  ‘A thank you would suffice,’ said Mark as his mechs finished dismantling the driller they’d found.

  He’d wasted five robots, she noticed. Five. It was hardly efficient.

  ‘Why don’t you focus on the helm?’ said Mark. ‘Aren’t you captain right now?’

  Ann snarled but hurled her attention away, slamming it back into helm-space.

  She scanned the long, black scarf of sticky filth that trapped her ship. Somewhere in that cloud, their enemy would be closing in. Fortunately, the ionic debris they had dumped would greatly simplify the process of winkling them out.

  Ann deployed eight plasma-flare charges on high-gee sub-light torches and waited yet again for them to crawl out from the hull to a useful ignition radius. Then she lit them.

  The space around the Dantes exploded into light. Ann had picked a wavelength for her flares designed to maximally warm the ions the disrupters
had already dumped. Even after the initial flare, the scarf continued to glow with residual light, making their enemies reassuringly visible – or the ones located within the disrupter cloud, at least. While in the smear, they couldn’t hide themselves with quantum cloaking. You needed cleaner space for that. Instead, they had to rely on hull albedo, which made them about as hard to see as coal chunks on a snowfield.

  She found a hundred and seventy-nine drones sneaking towards them – a disappointingly modest spread. Ann brought her grater-grids online and used g-rays to scrape every drone out of existence in a series of tidily optimised bursts.

  Clath whooped from somewhere behind her in helm-space.

  ‘We’re still alive!’

  ‘Spare your enthusiasm,’ said Ann. ‘The Photes could just be holding back. We can’t see anything outside the cloud yet. They may be waiting to take us alive. And right now we’re stuck.’

  ‘Then use the conventional engines!’ Clath urged. ‘They’re amazing in dirty space. The best ever built. Plus our caskets can do internal bio-support for microbursts of up to a hundred and twenty gees.’

  ‘I’m already on it,’ Ann snapped. She’d been fighting alone for years. The last thing she needed was help. It would only slow her down.

  ‘No, save the power,’ said Ira. ‘Don’t let them see how fast we can go. Crawl out first to draw them in, then use the engines.’

  ‘How many backseat drivers does this ship have?’ said Ann, and immediately realised that the answer would always be five.

  Ann used Ira’s tactic anyway, keeping her speed moderate as she pushed towards the back of the cloud, aiming for the closest available gap. Then, at the last minute, she activated the invasive bio-support and hurled the ship forwards without warp – all forty kilometres of it. The hull shrieked but held. Clath was right – the Dantes could really shift when it wanted to. The audio channel filled with her shipmates’ tortured gasps. Ann ignored them. They’d live.